Weathering big tank cars, Part 2

In the preceding post on this topic, I showed two 33,000-gallon LPG tank cars, in the form of HO scale cars by Tangent Models. These are to be weathered for a 1975 layout, making these cars about 10 years old. (The first post about these cars is at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/09/weathering-really-big-tank-cars.html .)

Just for a comparison, the 50-foot box cars I weathered earlier for the same layout are models of cars built only a few years before the layout era. Accordingly, they were only give a light overall haze of grime, as in this example.

I weathered the tank cars following my usual procedure (see “Reference pages” linked at top right) using washes of acrylic tube paints. I will begin by showing NATX 32141 (North American Car Corp.), leased to the Murphy Corporation, with a Spur logo. Murphy was a company operating a chain of retail gasoline stations, selling Spur gasoline, and also in the LPG market. 

I decided to weather the two sides a little differently. I wanted to show some streaking, and also some dirt discharge from below the valve bonnet. The first of these is the right side (following the usual rule, to stand at the B end looking at the car, and the right side is on your right). 

On the other side is more dirty streaking below the valve bonnet. Both sides have an overall dirtiness consistent with years in service.

The other car, NCTX 33019, is lettered as leased to the Canadian company Pacific 66, and lettered with the very large “LP GAS” lettering. The reporting mark belongs to North American Car (Canada) Limited. It is white and this color is always challenging to weather well. I decided to allow some “pooling” of dirt at low points. Here is the right side. 

I tried to get a little difference in the streaking and so on for the left side, along with dirt pooling along the lower curves of the tank. I also added some Pan Pastels to get the tone I wanted. 

These large cars are a different challenge from the freight cars I’m used to, and were interesting to deal with.

Tony Thompson 

 

Reworking a Broadway Limited chlorine car

Back in 2017 when the Broadway Limited HO scale high-pressure cars were released, I purchased more than I needed, including one of their “variety” four-packs to get a paint scheme I wanted. (If you’re interested in my 2017 review, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-new-broadway-limited-tank-cars.html .)

One of the cars that I didn’t need for operation was an Ethyl Corp. car, from which I stole the platform and ladder for another project. Recently I disassembled the EBAX model, and this is how it looked at that point. The valve bonnet part has become separated, and trucks are off. This is how the model languished for many months.

Much more recently,  I came across the K4 decals for Diamond Alkali chlorine cars. This inspired me to repair the EBAX car, with new side ladders and walkways, so I could repaint and re-letter it. 

I made walkways from scale 1 x 10-inch Evergreen styrene strip, attached with canopy glue, then added drop grab irons from A-Line underneath each walk. Ladders will come later.

At this point I could repaint the tank, which as you see above, was now separated from the underframe. The K4 decals I have are for Diamond Alkali, in the older scheme, which had either aluminum or gray tanks. I chose gray, and used Tamiya “Corsa Gray” (PS-32). 

The underframe and trucks were black, which the BLI model already has, so I reassembled the tank to the frame. I decided to have the handrail and ladder as body color, as was increasingly common in the 1950s. When freshly lettered with the K4 decals, set K4-DAX-87 A, it looked like this. 

I now added a ladder on each side at the car center. First, I painted a ladder from my parts stash, then created ladder sections by cutting to fit, and attached them with canopy glue. I also painted the bare metal wheel faces with a dark gray-brown mix. 

Next came weathering, following my usual procedures using washes of acrylic tube paints (see the “Reference pages” linked at the top right of this post). Finally, I added a few touches of Pan Pastels.

This completes my modification of the original Broadway Limited paint scheme on this model, to that of a different chemical company, still with the car matching its design character as a chlorine car.

But to enter service on my layout, the car needs one or more waybills. I checked Tank Car Tariff 300-H and found that Diamond Alkali had both 3000-gallon and 6000-gallon chlorine cars. Unfortunately K4 Decals chose the decal number for the smaller size series. I decided to ignore this discrepancy, as the model is definitely a 6000-gallon car.

The Diamond Alkali company was located in Painesville, Ohio (as the car lettering notes) and was located on the Fairport, Painesville & Eastern Railroad (FP&E). The FP&E, about 8 miles long, had interchanges with both the NYC and Nickel Plate but seems to have favored NYC. The NYC Shipper Guide seems to indicate that Painesville was a reciprocal switching district, thus no interchange location with NYC need be indicated. This produces a waybill like that below.

I look forward to seeing this model in service for an operating session on my layout.

Tony Thompson  

More of Rapido’s new 1937 AAR box cars

Recently I reported on two of the new 1937 AAR-design box cars in HO scale, both of them Canadian cars, as it happened (you can view that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/08/rapdios-new-1937-aar-box-cars.html ). Today I want to report on two others.

But first I have to mention the magisterial volume with phenomenal coverage of the 1937 cars, Patrick C. Wider’s monumental 384-page opus, Railway Prototype Cyclopedia, Volume 35 (Silverlake Images, 2020). I am overwhelmed every time I open it. If you’re a “freight car guy” and you don’t have it, your library is quite incomplete.

The first of the 1937 cars I want to present is an Erie car. The photo below shows the first car in an order for 200, Erie 79000–70199, built by Pullman-Standard in February 1940. It has a Viking corrugated roof, Youngstown doors, Ajax hand brake, steel grid running board, and Dreadnaught ends (Pullman photo, Biernacki collection).

The model faithfully reproduces the paint scheme, including the black roof, ends, and door. The running board is shown as unpainted. Soon after the built date of this car, Erie abandoned painting doors black, but naturally some cars so painted survived in service for years. That will be my challenge with this model, to be well-weathered original paint 13 years later, in my modeling year of 1953.  

The second car on today’s agenda is a Southern Pacific version. Like several major railroads, as soon as the AAR committee’s design features were pretty much settled in 1936, SP ordered 1750 cars from four builders, and a year later went back for 1000 more. So the “1937” design is important to the SP fleet. 

Of that initial order, 500 cars (SP 32770–33269, Class B-50-18) were built by Pullman-Standard, with an example shown below (Pullman-Standard photo). The first. 350 cars of this order had Ureco handbrakes.

Note that the initials SP here, with no periods. SP had discontinued the use of periods in reporting marks in 1931. An end view of another car of this class, at left below (Pressed Steel Car Co.), shows the five-spoke Ureco brake wheel also used on 350 of the Pullman-Standard cars. You can click on the image to enlarge it.

The model I received didn’t have this handbrake attached, but in the box was a small plastic envelope with two different handbrake assemblies, one of which was the five-spoke Ureco (at right above). I have heard some grumbles that handbrakes are not correct on some Rapido 1937 box cars; I hope these people still have the original box so they can search for such an envelope. I will replace the as-delivered handbrake with the correct Ureco.

These models have some nice details not usually included from the factory, such as a service stencil on the brake reservoir. I show an example below.

Below is the Rapido SP model. Like many and possibly all the cars of Class B-50-18, it has a black roof. But the lettering (spelled-out road name) was introduced in 1946, and in fact the car has a reweigh date of 1948. I know of no evidence that post-1946 repaints would have retained the black roof, discontinued by that time. I could of course repaint the roof. However, I can mask the road name and capacity data, and heavily weather the rest of the car, to make this a realistic paint scheme. 

Both these are nice models, and both require some judicious paint and weathering to be reasonable for my 1953 modeling year. I will return to that in a future post.

Tony Thompson 

Completing a Hendrickson reefer, Part 2

Last year, I posted the first steps in competing one of Richard Hendrickson’s projects that I inherited, which was on his work bench when he passed away. It is a resin kit for a Santa Fe Class RR-21 reefer. You can read the post about it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/07/completing-richard-hendrickson-reefer.html . 

In that first post, I showed the model as it came to me, basic body complete and underframe fully built, and then my first step, painting the side color but not other parts of the model. Unlike a number of Richard’s incomplete projects, this one didn’t have a box of detail parts with it, so I needed to select and install all of them. A first issue is what should they look like.

Here is a photo of a new Santa Fe RR-21 car, showing the ladders clearly (Santa Fe photo, from the Santa Fe Modelers’ book Refrigerator Cars, which Richard co-authored). This is the as-built paint scheme, not the later one I will apply to the model.

Clearly there is a 7-rung ladder on the side and a 6-rung ladder on the end, and the hand brake is Ajax. The brake step is solid metal, not a grid pattern. Grab irons are straight pattern.

As I mentioned in the previous post (linked in the first paragraph, above, I planned to detail the roof and ends, then mask the sides, and paint roof, ends and underframe black. That would allow simple masking of the un-detailed sides. At the same time, side details to be added, such as ladders and placard boards, can be painted black also, prior to attachment.

Although I did not have any ladders on hand that are as delicate looking as what you see in the photo above, I did want to have ladders with decent stiles and free-standing rungs. Most plastic ladders are for taller cars like box cars, so I had to hunt for shorter ladders. I had some ancient metal ladders in my parts collection that are indeed the right height, and trimmed some to the 6- and 7-rung lengths you see above. They are shown below, along with one original ladder at right from which I cut down the others.

I began with the A end of the car. I taped a 7-rung ladder to the side in the correct location, and made sure the 6-rung ladder would have its rungs aligned, then attached it with canopy glue. I also added a placard board, end-sill grab irons from styrene rod, and a wire grab iron at the right edge of the end. I then added what was needed to the B end (see prototype photo above), including an Ajax handbrake.

Another challenging problem with Santa Fe reefers is the hatch rest bars. An example is shown below, showing the hatches of a Class RR-10 car (Santa Fe photo), taken from the Santa Fe Modelers’ book cited above. 

What about dimensions? I haven’t found a modeling article that gives those dimensions, so I turned to the Santa Fe Modelers’ book again for a drawing, page 280. Below I show a portion of that drawing. Scaling the rest bar parts, they appear to be about 3 inches wide and stand about 12 inches high. I have seen them modeled with flat wire, which can be too narrow. (You can click on this to enlarge it.)

One could possibly consider styrene strip for these hatch rest bars, but the result would be terribly fragile. I decided to try using 0.005-inch brass sheet to cut strips to bend to the shape shown above. I will report further on that, and preparation for painting, in a future post.

Tony Thompson 

Another weathering project

I recently undertook to weather some mid-1970s freight cars for a friend. His layout is set in 1975, thus prior to the graffiti era. The models happen to have built dates within a year or two of the layout’s era, and thus will not be heavily weathered. 

(For those who are interested in graffiti, you might like to look at my article in Model Railroad Hobbyist. My post linking to that article, including a brief description of my method of paper overlays for graffiti, is at this link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2020/01/my-latest-column-in-mrh.html , and could also delve into my long-running series on techniques of graffiti application, culminating in no. 25 in the series: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/04/freight-car-graffiti-part-25-more.html .)

Several of the models to be weathered are the recent Rapido models of Pacific Car & Foundry 50-foot double-door box cars for Southern Pacific and subsidiary Cotton Belt, classes B-70-69, B-70-71, and B-70-75. All were produced between 1972 and 1975, and all had Hydra-Cushion underframes. Below is a view of a nearly-new car, SP 245723 (Class B-70-75), seen at Indio, CA on June 15, 1975 (Steve Vincent photo). Only three months old, it has Youngstown doors, as did most of these cars.

Here is a photo of a Class B-70-69 car, all of which class was assigned to the Cotton Belt, 820 cars numbered 66529–67349. These cars also had Youngstown doors. This prototype photo, from Jim Eager, shows the overall appearance, but having been taken in 1984, shows a level of weathering not appropriate for 1975.  

 Below is an image of one of the Rapido cars, right out of the box. It is well detailed and all aspects match the prototype, as far as I know. 

An important issue for me in completing weathering was to deal with all the changes in car maintenance lettering over the years after my own 1950s modeling. Cars had to be reweighed periodically until the 1970s; brake gear had to be oiled and tested; and in the late 1960s there were ACI labels applied. 

The ACI (Automatic Car Identification) labels were introduced in 1967, and it was mandatory for all railcar owners to apply them, although as late as 1975 only 90 percent of all cars had the labels. But by that time, it was already evident that the system could not continue. Dirt accumulation on the labels caused false readings, as did physical damage like scrapes. Railcar owners were supposed to have an active maintenance program for the labels, but that didn’t really happen, and the system was abandoned in 1977.

In 1972, a  consolidated stencil was introduced by the AAR for air brake maintenance, and was called a COTS label (Clean, Oil, Test, Stencil) to record work that was done. This was a single black box, and was adopted slowly. In 1974, a two-box label that added lubrication information for the wheel bearings was introduced, and the Federal Railroad Administration made it mandatory for all cars. Because the prototypes of some of the Rapido cars were built before 1974 (like the model shown above), they have the single-box COTS version.

Finally, cars had been required for decades to be reweighed periodically to determine light or tare or empty weight, but as all-steel cars became predominant, weight variations essentially disappeared, and later in the 1970s the reweigh requirement was eliminated. But all the Rapido models are new enough in 1975 that none wold yet have been reweighed.

I gave the models coats of flat finish, then weathered them with my usual procedure, using washes of acrylic tube paints (for process description and illustrations, see my “Reference pages” linked at the top right of this post). Here are the Cotton Belt model shown above, in the foreground, weathered, and in the background, an unweathered SP car of Class B-70-71.

I have five of these cars altogether, and am proceeding with the balance of the group. I will return to them, along with two quite different tank car models, in a future post.

Tony Thompson 

What about “mundane” freight car kits?

Following my lengthy saga about kitbashing an Erie 50-foot automobile car from a Branchline kit, with replaced roof and ends, and a detour considering it as a C&NW car (about which I put up five posts, concluding with this one: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/07/my-erie-50-ft-auto-car-conclusion.html ), I received a question. I’ll paraphrase it like this: “These big, complicated projects are fine, but do you ever do a plain old simple kit?” As a matter of fact, I do, and so I’ll show one. 

I think most modelers would agree that Accurail kits qualify as simple kits. Recently I built one of their USRA double-sheathed box car kits, a Great Northern car that models one of the 1500 box cars of this design that GN received in 1919. They were numbered in the 23494–24993 series, and were GN’s first box cars with a steel underframe instead of truss rods. Below is a GN photo of one of these cars, freshly repainted at St. Cloud shops in March 1925 (GNRHS collection).  

These cars were very durable. By my own modeling date of 1953, there were still 1222 of the original 1500 cars in service. and they continued in use through the 1950s. Below is a photo of one in 1958 (Virl Davis photo, Richard Hendrickson collection), with the original USRA Andrews trucks and 5-5-5 corrugated end visible.

(For a condensed history of the GN box car fleet, along with the rest of the GN freight cars, I recommend the chapter by Richard Hendrickson and Staffan Ehnbom in Patrick Dorin’s book, Great Northern Lines East, Second Edition, Signature Press, 2001) .

The Accurail kit is, of course, straightforward. It could be upgraded by replacing the molded grab irons with wire ones, but for me this is a layout model, and can serve in original condition. However, there are a few changes to the kit as supplied that I do make. 

To begin, I cut the steel weight in half, glued the two halves together with canopy glue, and glued the pair in the center of the floor. This leaves truck screw holes completely open, and I tapped them 2-56. Mechanically, I put InterMountain wheelsets in the kit sideframes, and Kadee #158 whisker couplers in the kit coupler boxes. Here is that weight application.

Next, I replaced the vulnerable plastic brake wheel with a Cal-Scale brass one, soldered to a brass wire staff. And third, I added roof corner grab irons with the Tichy wire parts. 

Then, after a protective coat of flat finish, I weathered with acrylic tube paint, in the form of washes (see “Reference pages” linked at the top right of this post). The GN emblem here is the 1941–48 version. Finally, I added decal paint patches for fresh reweigh and repack stencils, along with route cards and chalk marks.

This kind of straightforward freight car kit is fun to build and quickly gives a layout-quality result. It will go into service on my layout right away.

Tony Thompson 

My Erie 50-ft. auto car: Conclusion

In preceding posts, I described a somewhat meandering project to build a 50-foot automobile car from a Branchline kit, and add a Viking roof (because I had one in my stash). My first plan was to do this for the Chicago & North Western, as described in the initial post in this series (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/06/a-simple-freight-car-kitbash.html ).

But upon discovering that I already had a 50-ft. C&NW auto car with a Viking roof (memo to self: check fleet before dreaming up projects), I decided to pivot to doing an Erie car, even though it meant removing the Dreadnaught ends I had already applied to the Branchline body (that is presented in the third post in this series, which can be found at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/04/my-50-foot-automobile-car-part-3.html ).

I replaced the Dreadnaught ends with inverse Hutchins ends from Chad Boas, and continued onward to finish the body details, then painted the model with boxcar red sides and roof and black ends, as was common on Erie cars of the decade after World War II.  That work is shown in Part 4 of this series (you can see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/07/my-50-foot-erie-auto-car-part-4.html ).

In trying to understand the Erie 50-foot automobile cars, I turned to the April 1940 Official Railway Equipment Register (ORER). There I found several groups of such cars. First was series 68100–68199, cars with paired 6-foot side doors, and series 62200–68224, almost identically dimensioned cars except for paired 8-foot doors; and cars 68225–68299, again, cars with 6-foot doors. 

Since my Branchline car body has 8-foot doors, my choice of number series was obvious. Luckily I was able to obtain a nice photo of a car from this series, which is shown below. You can just see that it does indeed have a Viking roof, and though the black ends are not very visible, what is visible is consistent with the Hutchins ends. And this is the paint scheme I wanted to apply, with the six-foot herald. Incidentally, in this photo, only the right-hand door is open.

In the year I model, 1953, there were 24 of the original 25 cars in the series Erie 68200–68224. Of those, 16 had auto loading racks and thus had AAR mechanical  designation XMR, while 8 of them had racks either disabled or removed, and were AAR designation XM. That includes the car shown above, 68220, and the car number I chose to model, 68214.

You can click on the image above to enlarge it. If you do, you may note that the capacity of this car is somewhat surprising, only 70,000 pounds, a value confirmed by the ORER.  

The photo above shows clearly the arrangement of side lettering. It also suggests what the end lettering arrangement is, but a better view is in the Magor view shown in Part 4 (link above). Here is just the end portion: 

I dug around in the decal stash I inherited from Richard Hendrickson, and found Champ set HN-63, and also a set HB-3 with the large Erie emblems. Dimensional data were pieced together with elements from two Champ data sets HD-2. Below is a view of the model with lettering applied; I did apply the 70,000 pound capacity. Next comes trucks and couplers, the running board, and then weathering. 

As mentioned earlier, I applied a Kadee 50-ft. running board, attached with canopy cement, along with Kadee #158 couplers and the kit truck frames with InterMountain wheelsets. I then used my ordinary process of weathering, based on washes of acrylic tube paints (descriptions and illustrative example in the “Reference pages” linked at the top right of this post).  Last, I added a few chalk marks and route cards. 

This was an interesting if somewhat circuitous project, with the false start on a C&NW car; but in the end I created a car I wanted to have on the layout. That is tops among my criteria for freight car projects.

Tony Thompson 

My 50-foot Erie auto car, Part 4

I began work on a kitbash of a Branchline 50-foot automobile car, adding a Viking roof and preparing to model a Chicago & North Western car. But as described in a previous post, I pivoted away from that goal and decided to model an Erie car with this roof.  (Here’s a link to that earlier post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/04/my-50-foot-automobile-car-part-3.html .)

I have not found a good end view of the 50-foot Erie Viking-roof cars, but there does exist a nice Magor Car Co. image of the B end of one of Erie’s 40-foot double-door cars, also with inverse Hutchins ends. This is probably an adequate guide to what the 50-foot cars with those ends would look like.

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Continuing with model work, I added Branchline grab irons to my model’s car sides and ends, locating the end ones as shown above, and also attached the end placard boards.

For the B end brake gear, I used some Tichy parts on hand from other projects, both for the brake step and supports, and for the gear box and handwheel of the hand brake. I added a length of brass rod to represent the brake shaft. 

Completing side details are the sill steps. The sill steps that you see in the photo above are what A-Line calls a “Style B” step, and I applied those A-Line steps. All these parts installed with canopy glue. Since I planned to attach coupler box lids with screws, I made new lids to fit. The model was then ready for paint.

I chose to use Tamiya red primer (“Oxide Red,” no. 87160, a paint I have previously found to give excellent boxcar-red color. The model below rests on my “interim truck support blocks” for painting (for a description, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/11/interim-truck-support-blocks.html ). A running board from Kadee will be installed later.

Next came the decision about black roof and ends. From what I gathered from Erie modelers I consulted, and learned from the late Richard Hendrickson, the common black end on Erie box cars was car cement to protect the steel end, not a paint scheme,  and was applied to cars as needed, not throughout the fleet (though some car were evidently delivered with black ends). I decided to do my model that way. 

Masking car sides with grab irons and ladders already applied can be challenging, but it’s much easier with a capable masking tape such as the fine Tamiya product. It can readily be stretched to place it where it’s needed. And since the paint already on the model is Tamiya, I thought it best to use a black color of the same maker. I chose Tamiya “Rubber Black,” TS-82, as a kind of off-black color. 

Next comes lettering and weathering. I also will need to choose a car number. I don’t have as much information as I’d like about the prototype, but it looks like the Erie cars numbered 68200–68275 are my prime candidates. I will discuss that point, and show all the finishing, in a following post

Tony Thompson 

Fruit Growers' Western branch

Fruit Growers Express (FGE) was a very large refrigerator car owner, serving  most railroad in the Southeast and beyond, including, for example the Pennsylvania. Also included in the “family,” as they were wont to call it, were two of the Hill lines: the Great Northern and the CB&Q. The Northern Pacific, notably, did not join. 

The two Hill lines members of FGE kept their own reporting marks (Western Fruit Express in the case of the GN, Burlington Refrigerator Express in the case of the CB&Q), and their cars retained the normal railroad emblems. Those cars were part of the FGE fleet for operating purposes, but they continued to be owned by the two railroads, not by FGE, as was the case for the rest of the fleet.

An example of these cars is this builder photo from American Car & Foundry in 1948, of a string of new WFEX cars (Richard Hendrickson collection). The lettering style is indeed that of FGE, but the cars are not labeled as FGEX, but instead are Western Fruit Express, WFEX.

The FGE fleet was essentially operated as a single unit when cars were in demand, in other words, any kind of car could be loaded anywhere, but when empty cars were in surplus, the late Bill Welch told me that GN and CB&Q cars were sent home.

I’ve always found these “Western branch” cars interesting, and yard photos on the SP and UP do show them in many cases, validating their frequent presence in the West. Accordingly, I have acquired models of several of them. Probably my favorite is a model of a WFEX car built by Bill Welch himself and passed on to me, complete with correct FGE hatch rest bars. 

Burlington’s cars were essentially the same pattern as the WFEX cars, using the FGE lettering characters but with a CB&Q emblem. Here is a Accurail model of one. 

One interesting variation in the pattern is that the CB&Q had subsidiaries (for example, the Fort Worth & Denver City — “City” was dropped in 1951), and the Colorado  & Southern, acquired in 1908. Both continued to be operated under those names. Refrigerator cars were operated by both; the C&S had 143 reefers under the CX mark in 1953, while the FW&D had 59 cars lettered FWDX.

I have an ancient Silver Streak reefer lettered CX, an assembled car I obtained at a swap meet years ago. Like many early Silver Streak models, it is about ten percent oversize, though that is not evident in most freight trains. It’s shown here at the Peerless Foods wholesale grocer on my layout.

I also have a Red Caboose model of an FWDX reefer, again an interesting variant in reefer reporting marks for an operating session. Here it’s shown on my layout at Guadalupe Fruit in Ballard. 

Each of these cars sees operating use on my layout during those peak harvest months of June through September. But the rest of the year, cars being loaded are pretty much all PFE, and you wouldn’t see these Fruit Growers “Western branch” cars in use for produce shipping.

Tony Thompson 

Reworking a PFE car kit, Conclusion

This is the concluding post in my description of modifying the appearance of an otherwise stock Red Caboose kit for a reconditioned PFE reefer, Class R-30-9. I began with the prototype background of these cars, created during 1938–1940 from (mostly) Class R-30-12 cars built some 15 years earlier, along with some cars of Class R-30-13. 

“Reconditioning” meant a completely new superstructure, with new and upgraded insulation, but without performing work on the underframe and brake gear (other than needed repairs). In the parlance of the AAR and the IRS, in addition to PFE, this did not constitute rebuilding. But because of improved insulation and ice bunkers, they were given a new car class, R-30-9. 

In the first post of this series, I showed a prototype photo of one of these cars (see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/05/reworking-pfe-car-kit.html ). Here is another image, this time showing a car as-reconditioned, at the Stockton, CA ice deck on July 13, 1941 (Wilbur C. Whittaker photo). It has retained the original T-section trucks, but like all the cars of 95737–98718, has new steel ice hatches. Side lettering says it was reconditioned in April 1940, so the paint is barely a year old; it was originally PFE 20028, built in July 1922.

I wanted to model a car like this. After stripping the kit lettering, airbrushing fresh Star brand paint on sides and ends, and adding steel nuts for weight (shown in that first post), I built the kit sub-assemblies of roof and underbody, as I showed in the second post, along with beginning decal lettering with Microscale set 87-501 (the second post may be found at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/05/reworking-pfe-car-kit-part-2.html ). 

Once the new decals had been protected with a coat of clear flat, I assembled the car body (so far without an underbody). This looks good so far.

 Next I completed work on the underbody, adding sill steps and Kadee #158 couplers, along with the kit truck frames. Wheelsets were replaced with superior ones from InterMountain. Here is the completed car, nicely retaining the black side sill of the 1950 scheme (side sills became orange in 1951). 

Next came weathering. As always with PFE, this is difficult to choose in the abstract, because of PFE’s extensive car washing (for data see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/11/appearance-of-pfe-reefers-part-3.html ), along with their practice, until the mid-1950s, of repainting any car with even the most minor repairs. I have chosen to apply a light degree of weathering.

The way I did the weathering was following my usual technique with washes of acrylic tube paint (for description and examples, see the Reference pages linked at the top right corner of this post). After adding a coat of clear flat, a few chalk marks, and route cards, the car looked as shown below, being switched to the ice deck in my layout town of Shumala by SP 1284, a Class S-12 0-6-0. 

This is going to be a nice addition to my PFE fleet, and it will certainly be among the cars switched at my next operating session.

Tony Thompson 

Reworking a PFE car kit, Part 2

As I mentioned in a recent post, I have had occasional suggestions about this blog, that I write about PFE car models more often. I’ve now begun one such description, making changes to a Red Caboose kit. I gave the background, and a prototype photo, in the first post. That previous post is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/05/reworking-pfe-car-kit.html .

The kit is generally well designed, and I like to build it in sub-assemblies, as I think the manufacturer intended. First is the roof, a moderately complicated assembly, being a reefer. It has 20 parts in all. I show the completed roof below. 

Next, I chose to complete the underframe. I always find the placement of the cross-bearers in these kits a little tedious, and the center sills never seem to fit without some fiddling. I drilled out the coupler box lids so that the entire coupler assembly can be tapped for 2-56 screws. The kit includes K brakes, appropriate for these cars after their 1937–1940 reconditioning, but in 1949–1951, all were reconditioned again, this time getting AB brakes, so I dipped into the parts stash and added those brake parts.  

One can note in the prototype photo of PFE 98444 in the previous post, even with the low angle from which the photo was taken, that brake piping and rodding is invisible, due to the center sill. I chose accordingly not to add any of those details. This is, in practical terms, a layout model.  Even so, if one counts the coupler box screws, the underframe assembly contains 29 parts (before adding the six sill steps).

Below is the completed underbody, with the car body in the background, with its interior now painted to eliminate translucence (Tamiya “German Grey,” TS-4).  

I wasn’t sure the color of the car ends matched the roof (though Red Caboose colors were generally pretty accurate), so oversprayed them with Star “SP/UP Freight Car Red” (STR-30), then applied decals from the excellent Microscale set 87-501, containing Dick Harley’s fine artwork. As you see below, detail parts had not yet been installed on these ends. At the time of the 1950 paint scheme, wood-sheathed ends still received the 7-inch lettering you see here.

The car number was chosen as part of the 97,000 series, as I didn’t have a model in that series. Long ago, I conceived the idea of having about one PFE model car for each thousand prototype PFE cars, a fleet of nearly 40,000 cars at the time I model. I haven’t been rigid about this, but use it as a guideline.

With the amount of detail on the sides quite minimal on this kit (just add grab irons and a ladder to each side), I decided to start applying decals to the sides. I used the Microscale set mentioned above. Many modelers wait until all detail parts are applied and the car completed before lettering, but I often letter at an intermediate state if it suits the model. 

The car is now well along, and I will describe its completion and weathering in a following post.

Tony Thompson 

Reworking a PFE car kit

In response to a recent question I was asked (“Why don’t you write more about PFE cars?”), I will describe recent work on a Red Caboose HO scale kit for a PFE reconditioned reefer, kit RC-4121-3, for a car of PFE Class R-30-12-9. There are a number of things I will choose to do for this kit.

I’ll begin with the kit as it comes from the box. It’s nicely decorated (as they always say in magazine reviews), but it is the 1936–1942 paint scheme, with single railroad emblems on each side. It’s shown below.

The car body above is molded in orange plastic. This is both good news and bad news. It means, on the good side, that lettering can be removed without affecting the background color; but on the bad side, the plastic is translucent, and needs to have the car interior painted a neutral color like dark gray to kill the translucence.  

This paint scheme was rare on wood-sheathed cars by 1950 and essentially absent by 1953, because newer paint schemes after World War II, and very large volumes of shop work in the postwar years, meant that a wood-sheathed car like this would undoubtedly have been repainted by my modeling year of 1953. 

Here is the scheme that is far more suitable for my modeling year, in a George Sisk photo from the Charles Winters collection. As is documented in the Southern Pacific Freight Car Painting and Lettering Guide (SP Historical & Technical Society, Upland, CA, 2016), authored by Dick Harley and me, page 141, this is the 1950 PFE scheme, with all side hardware orange, along with sill steps, and both railroad medallions black and white. Dimensional data and other lettering details differ from the kit lettering, so all kit lettering needs to go.

Since there is no significant part of the lettering worth saving, nor is it particularly well rendered, I removed all of it with Scalecoat stripper, on both sides and ends. I then fired up the airbrush and added a coat on the car sides of Star brand STR-27, “Daylight Orange,” (a color adopted by PFE eight years before the more-famous SP “Daylight” trains). The same paint was airbrushed onto the sprues of side hardware parts (sprues D and G), provided in the kit in black, so they would be ready to be applied to the body. 

Next I assembled the kit. For the most part, this is simply following instructions. But there are a few things that require explication. Some have been presented before, in a report on a similar car kit (see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/01/reconditioned-pfe-car-part-2-model.html ).

For features of the prototype PFE cars that were reconditioned — being formerly cars of Class R-30-12, they were re-classed when reconditioned as Class R-30-12-9, then after World War II this was simplified by omitting the original -12, making them simply Class R-30-9 — one can consult Chapter 7 in the PFE book (Thompson, Church and Jones, Pacific Fruit Express, 2nd edition, Signature Press, 2000). A number of details are provided about the 7694 cars of this class, PFE’s largest.

As I do when car weights are not supplied in a kit, I glued two 5/8-11 steel nuts inside the car body, using canopy cement. This gives plenty of weight, and canopy glue is perfect for joining dissimilar materials, as is the case here. 

One last point relates to the roof. In the last group of R-30-9 cars, steel ice hatches were applied and ice hatch platforms removed, cars PFE 95737–98718. And note in the prototype photo above of PFE 98444 that wood running boards were retained; all these cars were reconditioned during 1937–1940, when this was usual practice. I will do the same, as I’ll describe in a future post.

Tony Thompson